ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION system , uses

uses or ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION
In this section, we shall discuss the advantages and disadvantages of digital communication briefly.

1. Advantages

          Following are the advantages of digital communication:

(i)      The digital communication systems are simpler and cheaper compared to analog communication systems because of the advances made in the IC technologies.
(ii)     In digital communication, the speech, video and other data may be merged and transmitted over a common channel using multiplexing.
(iii)    Using data encryption, only permitted receivers may be allowed to detect the transmitted data. This property is of its most importance in military applications.
(iv)    Since the transmission is digital and the channel encoding is used, therefore the noise does not accumulate from repeater to repeater in long distance communications.
(v)     Since the transmitted signal is digital in nature, therefore a large amount of noise interference may be tolerated.
(vi)    Since in digital communication, channel coding is used, therefore the errors may be detected and corrected in the receivers.
(vii)   Digital communication is adaptive to other advanced branches of data processing such as digital signal processing, image processing and data compression etc.

2. DISADVANTAGES OF DIGITAL COMMUNICATION

          Although digital communication offers, so many advantages as discussed above, it has some drawbacks also. However, the advantages of digital communication outweight disadvantages.
The disadvantages are as under:
(i)      Due to analog to digital conversion, the data rate becomes high. Therefore more transmission bandwidth is required for digital communication.
(ii)     Digital communication needs synchronization in case of synchronous modulation.